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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23633878">To the Waters and the Wild</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/pseuds/StopTalkingAtMe'>StopTalkingAtMe</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Zone Blanche | Black Spot (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Fix-It of Sorts, Oral Sex, Sex as Grief Processing, Treat</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 19:08:05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,995</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23633878</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/pseuds/StopTalkingAtMe</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s not until Camille's hands have stopped shaking that she realises the mistake she’s made, and by then it’s too late.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Camille Laugier/Laurène Weiss</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Smut 4 Smut 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>To the Waters and the Wild</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/gifts">kimaracretak</a>.</li>



    </ul></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>‘We foot it all the night,<br/>Weaving olden dances<br/>Mingling hands and mingling glances<br/>Till the moon has taken flight;<br/>To and fro we leap<br/>And chase the frothy bubbles,<br/>While the world is full of troubles<br/>And anxious in its sleep.<br/>Come away, O human child!<br/>To the waters and the wild’</p><p>- From <em>The Stolen Child</em>, by W. B. Yeats</p><p> </p><p>It’s not until her hands have stopped shaking that she realises the mistake she’s made, and by then it’s too late. Nor is she able to forget what she’s done: her body won’t let her. The days turn into weeks and the gunshots continue to ring against her palm and along the bones of her arm as though the impact has bruised her all the way down to the marrow. As though Laurène has marked her where no one else can see.</p><p>Something else she cannot forget: there is no such thing as a perfect murder. If she’s made one mistake – and clearly she has – she’ll have made others, each one a bear trap she laid herself and forgot about. Like Marion Steiner's USB key: too much to hope it’s lost forever or that it never existed at all. It’s out there somewhere, and it was pure luck that Cora failed to find it in the marsh. Too early to say whether that luck is good or bad.</p><p>It wasn’t until they were in the car and well away from the marsh that she could allow herself to breath. In the passenger seat Cora was dialling her mother’s phone. Sullen at her failure and not realising it had saved her life, she hadn’t said a word to Camille since they left the marsh, yet here she was leaving a message for a dead woman, while Camille flexed her still-stinging hand on the wheel with the confession pressing at her throat.</p><p><em>The major won’t call you back,</em> she wanted to say. <em>She’s dead.</em></p><p>And still she doubted. Everything seemed to have been turned upside down these days, so maybe Laurène would answer the phone after all. Maybe she wouldn’t stay dead any more than Marion had stayed buried. Yet another thing she couldn’t get right.</p><p>Her mistakes are mounting up. More and more of them everywhere she looks. For a long time she can’t see how she could have fixed them. And when she finally does, it’s not like it helps.</p><p>It’s a day like any other, just one in an endless parade of identical days, and each one to be dreaded: Teddy Bear and Siriani’s talk about stepping up the search, the thermal imaging cameras that they all know will never materialise because the cold truth is that if the forest doesn’t want someone to be found, they won’t be. And Cora Weiss will turn up at some point too, demanding to know what’s being done to find her mother and whatever the answer is demanding to know why the fuck they’re not doing <em>more.</em></p><p>It’s Hermann she has to thank for the epiphany, although perhaps the word should be ‘blame’, since there isn’t a damn thing she can do about it now. As he’s giving her a lift to the <em>gendarmerie</em>, they pass Gérald Steiner’s car, and he growls something under his breath. She isn’t really listening – she isn’t in the mood for his paternalistic bullshit today – but she hears enough to get the gist: if Gérald Steiner was dead, there’s no doubt it would solve a lot of problems. God knows, Hermann wouldn’t try too hard to find the killer. Whoever it was, they’d have done Villefranche a favour. Probably deserve a medal.</p><p>It’s not the first time she’s heard it, but this time it’s like a spark to bone-dry kindling. The labyrinth she’s been stumbling through is scorched to ash in a heartbeat.</p><p>The image she sees in her mind has the solidity and weight of something that already happened. She sees Gérald Steiner waiting for her in the forest. Glancing over his shoulder and smiling in a way that doesn’t touch his eyes as she approaches. Straightening up and flicking the butt of his cigar away into the bushes as he turns to face her. The way his expression changes as she raises the gun, takes aim, blows his fucking brains out.</p><p>The vision is followed by a wave of fury so intense she shakes with it. She has to tighten her hands on her knees until her knuckles whiten to stop herself from screaming. Hermann shoots a glance her way, but wisely keeps silent.</p><p>The worst of it is how easy it would have been. A call from a burner phone, a quiet whisper down the line: <em>I know who killed Marion Steiner</em>. Letting him think it might be someone he knew to make certain he didn’t tell anyone where he was going, who he was going to see. Letting him think she was giving him the chance to enact his own vengeance for the death of his granddaughter – in exchange for a large envelope of cash, naturally. The Steiners understand greed.</p><p>The vision is so strong she can still fade it even after it’s faded, like the taste of blood in the back of a throat tightening with guilt and grief.</p><p>She could have done it. Her family would have been safe, her mother and brother free of the danger of reprisals. She could have gone to Laurène and confessed. Helped them find Marion’s body. The injuries would support her story that the death was entirely accidental. A stupid mistake. She could have thrown herself on Siriani’s mercy in return for spilling everything she knew about Gérald Steiner. Her career would have been over, and she might well have gone to jail, but her family would have been safe, and as for Laurène…</p><p>It's eerie how real it feels. Maybe there is a world where she did exactly that. Or another world where Marion survived. Or one where Cora found the USB key, and forced Camille to kill her, the crows rising in a black cloud from the stripped bare skeletons of trees at the sound of a gunshot ripping the world apart.</p><p>All these worlds and others swarm inside her like a flock of crows caged within the fragile confines of her ribs. She dreams of everything that was and that might have been, and of waking to find herself pinned to the bed by the weight of a carrion bird perched upon her chest, all sleek black feathers and glassy eyes and parting beak, the pink worm-like tongue reaching from the black hollow of its throat as it readies itself to feast on her immobilised flesh.</p><p>And she dreams of Laurène.</p><p> </p><p>* * *</p><p> </p><p>The forest has come for her.</p><p>She wakes in what used to be her room, her bed now a soft cushioning of moss over sprawling roots clawing their way out of the earth. The air is damp and cool, and she’s been breathing it in for a while: she can taste the forest in her throat, feel it in her lungs. The room is a ruin, the crumbling walls ceding to lichen-covered outcrops of rock, flaking plaster blackened with mould and draped with ivy. The floorboards buckle, pushed upwards by roots, and ceiling tiles litter the ground like fallen autumn leaves. The ceiling lies open to the night sky, letting in moonlight and silver mist.</p><p>The wall above the window is gone, the upper panes now jagged shards, and the frame partially grown over with ivy. Through the makeshift curtain she can see the forest that has grown up around her mother’s house. The human boundaries of Villefranche have ceded to the will of the forest as they always must. The shadows shift in the breeze, veiling and unveiling the swollen face of the moon. And the face of the one that watches.</p><p>It perches on the rocks where a chair once stood, so still that it seems at first an illusory trick of the light, perfectly camouflaged by skin like rough bark. Seemingly featureless, more like a sculpture hewn from living wood than a flesh-and-blood being, with antlers rising from the crown of its skull. In fact, she isn’t certain it’s there at all until it opens its eyes and she sees the glint of moonlight deep in the pitted sockets.</p><p>At the sound of something deep moving through the undergrowth where the hallway used to be, she looks away. And almost instantly wishes she hadn’t.</p><p>A massive boar, bigger than any she’s ever seen, emerges from behind the jagged remnants of the wall. It’s a hulking monster, with brutal curving tusks designed for gouging and leathery skin covered in thick coarse hairs. And it reeks: animal musk and piss-soaked straw, and something underneath, something richer and darker that makes Camille’s skin heat.</p><p>It regards her for a few moments with vicious glittering eyes, then seems to dismiss her. And still she shrinks away as it passes by, its thick hide scraping up against what remains of what used to be her bed, and vanishes, grunting, between the tree.</p><p>Why she does it she cannot say. She only knows that she has no choice. She rolls from the bed, and follows the boar, the spongy moss beneath her bare feet as with every step she moves further away from the island of not-quite reality and deeper into the forest, with the call of the horned creature following in her wake.</p><p>It’s fast, the boar, faster than she thought a creature of its size could ever be. And she is naked, vulnerable to the scratch of rocks and brambles. She claws her way through the undergrowth, turning her head to one side to shield her eyes from lashing branches, and sees for an instant through the trees a woman, slender and pale, the face tipped back and alight with moonlight.</p><p>Camille opens her mouth to call out, takes a step towards her, and the ground gives way. It sends her tumbling down a sharp incline, jagged rocks scraping at her exposed skin. She throws up the hands to protect her face and breasts, fumbling at roots and whatever she can to stay her fall.</p><p>She slams into the ground at the bottom, shaken. Lying still, she recovers her senses, checking her body for injuries more serious than scratches and bruises. At least until she becomes aware of the musky pig-reek, older and wilder than anything found at any farmyard.</p><p>The boar. And that’s not all.</p><p>There is a woman standing at the boar’s side, her hand resting on its bristled back. Dappled shadows tiger-stripe across green-stained skin, mottled with lichen. Her hair is damp, slicked into wet hanks that lie in coils over her thin shoulders, and woven with flowers, wild rambling roses. Water droplets bead on her skin, as if Camille has interrupted her bathing in the waterfall-fed pool behind her, where the water ceaselessly churns and spills in turn out over a series of smaller stepped waterfalls. On her torso, where the skin is the lightest shade of green spring grass, Camille recognises the puckered knot of a bullet hole.</p><p>Camille crouches on her knees, her awareness of her nakedness sharpening to an excruciating point. The damp soaks up through her knees and into her bones, running all the way up to her spine. She’s aware, dimly, that it is no longer night-time, that this is some strange interstitial place between day and night, but cannot look away from the woman, from a face that is at once both painfully familiar and utterly strange, with eyes that stare upon her with cool, detached disdain. No hatred or accusation, only offended contempt, as though Camille has committed an act of sacrilege by stumbling upon this place, playing Actaeon to this Diana.</p><p><em>No, </em>she thinks, dizzy with the absurdity of it. <em>Not Diana. Arduinna</em>.</p><p>The urge to laugh bubbles up inside her. She felt the same urge the moment she realised Marion was not just hurt, but dead, ludicrously, impossibly <em>dead</em>, and again her mind refuses to accept it, just as it did then, insisting that she could simply hit ‘undo’ and unweave the world.</p><p>"Laurène?"</p><p>Is she expecting a reply? If so, she doesn’t get one. Laurène only tilts her head. Her eyes are amber, like a wolf’s. Eerie, yet strangely familiar too, and a memory comes swimming up, something fragile and distorted and not quite real: a night at Sabine’s, with a local folk band playing live, and the light catching strangely in Laurène’s eyes as she brought a beer bottle to her lips. For a moment, they’d seemed to burn amber. Nothing but a trick of the light, but in Camille’s memories it’s real enough.</p><p>And she can’t bear it any longer, those unnatural eyes regarding her as if she’s a strange species of beetle, something to be examined, then, if necessary, crushed. Which is probably no more than she deserves, but she still cannot bear it.</p><p>"Your daughter’s searching for you." Her guilt twists her words into something like spite. She wouldn’t be able to get them out otherwise. She thinks of Cora, who never even seemed to like her mother much. One of the lies Camille told herself, until she couldn’t anymore, having seen how Cora reacted to her mother’s disappearance, consumed with the search. Taking on her mother’s obsession like it was a cloak.</p><p>Something flickers in the amber eyes, the first flash of humanity. It’s not enough: she needs more. She needs to twist the knife deeper.</p><p>"I would have killed her." She spits the words through a sensation in her throat that might be laughter or tears. The amber eyes flare bright, their glare intense. It takes everything in Camille to hold that gaze, her body shaking with fear. "Why not? I killed <em>you</em>, right?"</p><p>One moment Laurène's face is unreadable; the next it's blazing with rage. An unseen force slams into Camille’s back, knocking her to the ground, hard enough to knock the wind out of her. Then it’s as if strong arms seize hold of her and send her tumbling end over end across the glade and into the water. For an instant her face is submerged, and then she’s up and gasping, caught in the grip of a strong current, which feels like frozen hands pinching at her. They drag her through the water and over the stepped falls, the rocks banging against knees and elbows, scraping against her skin. The stream is shallow, but the rocks are slippery and the current far stronger than it should be as she scrambles to right herself, her feet slipping out from under her. It feels as if the water itself is deliberately snatching at her ankles.</p><p>As she slips again, cracking her knee against a rock, she sees the boar and Laurène beside it, veiled in dappled shadow, and she’s gasping, crying out, "I’m sorry. I’m sorry," before her hair catches on something she’s hauled beneath the water again. A stinging in her scalp as she wrenches free and finds the bank, claws her way out, soaked to the skin and shivering. She sucks in each air with each hitching breath, then stiffens at the scuff of bare feet on the pine needles. Her gaze shifts towards them, but she can’t bring herself to look up, to see the rage in those eyes.</p><p>"You don’t know what it was like," she pleads. "How scared I was. What else could I have done?"</p><p>The dampness on her cheeks feels like the thin mist of rain. And then she’s back there, in the moment of waiting, the hood pulled up, the solid weight of the gun in her hand, and that treacherous inner voice telling herself that she wasn’t going to do it, right up until the moment that she <em>did</em>. Her hands are trembling again, the way they had after the murder, and her arms are aching once again with the major’s dead weight. She feels a lurch of nausea at the memory, how she’d gone to the quarry with the knowledge of what she might have to do, even while part of her hoped that by some miracle there was still a chance she could fix things. And it would have had to be a miracle, because even then she knew she was lying to herself, because if she didn’t tell herself there was still hope, if she couldn’t hold that faint possibility in her mind as she waited for Laurène to come to her, then she wouldn’t have been able to do it.</p><p>She drops her head and presses her forehead into the earth. "I’m sorry," she says. Not speaking to the watching creature, but to the memory of Laurène she holds in her mind, who is everything she’s always aspired to be, everything she’s always wanted. "I made a mistake." <em>So many mistakes.</em> "I didn’t… I never meant..."</p><p>False starts. Stutterings. Each one leads to a dead end and sounds like a falsehood. So many lies have spilled out of her mouth this past year, she’s forgotten how to distinguish between lies and truth. And it’s not like it matters anyway. She knows that there can be no forgiveness, that it doesn’t matter how terrified she was. This creature, with her wolf’s eyes and her hair all bound with wild roses, won’t give a damn for any of that. Maybe in that she’s not so very different from the real Laurène.</p><p>And after the excuses and rationalisations have been stripped away, only one thing remains.</p><p>"I miss you." Her voice is flat, numb, but for the first time it doesn’t sound like a lie. "I love you."</p><p>The boar snorts nearby. Too close. She’s been too focused on Laurène, she forgot all about it and her fear chokes off her words. She flinches away, curling up into a ball, then flinches again as a bare foot appears in the line of her vision. Shoots curl around the ankles, twining up over Laurène’s legs. She has just enough time to take this in, and then a hand cups her cheek and tilts her head upwards. Camille sees with a growing sense of unreality that the flowers twined through Laurène’s hair are not purely decoration, but are also rooted in her skin. One twines down between the corner of her lips and into her mouth and another frill of them are growing in a semi-circle around her temple, the skin bulging where they emerge from her body. Camille sees this, recognises it, but cannot quite take it in.</p><p>She doesn’t know what has happened to Laurène, how much of the consciousness behind those wolfish eyes is still the woman she knew, but if there’s one thing Camille can do, it’s recognise the ones who are as lost as she is. Laurène never even tried to hide it: she displayed it for all to see, out of pride or defiance, or simply to show that no matter what was done to her, she was still there. It’s gone now, that feeling, so if this creature is really Laurène, then maybe, whatever she spent her life searching for, she’s finally found it.</p><p>Slowly, Laurène drops to her knees, so that they’re mirror images of each other and catches hold of Camille's wrist with her hand. It is, Camille realises, the maimed hand, but now the missing fingers have been restored. In fascination, Camille runs her own thumb over the knuckles of those once-missing fingers, wondering if Laurène might be restored to her as her stolen fingers have been restored. When she looks up her hope must shine naked on her face.</p><p>Laurène cups her cheeks, bringing her face down to Camille’s. There is something inhuman about the way she moves, about the hair scented with the flowers rooted beneath her skin and those golden lupine eyes.</p><p>The kiss feels like being claimed, like being marked. Laurène tastes metallic as iron, her thumbs rubbing against Camille’s temples with gentle pressure, as she draws Camille’s lower lip out, first with lips and then with teeth.</p><p>The taste of blood, like ink dropped in water. Hands on her shoulders, then sliding to her upper arms, and all the while her breasts ache to be touched. Impatient, greedy, she fights – and loses – the battle to stop herself from arching her back and begging wordlessly to be touched, while at a distance, far removed, she hears the crows. Their clamour is drowned out by the teeth that nip at her lips as the kiss hardens into something crueller, the crush of lips and teeth.</p><p>Camille shivers though not from cold. Heat pools in her groin. She can feel the wetness between her thighs, knows that if she touches herself she’ll find herself slick with need, and with that knowledge comes a rush of desire, touched with shame and fear that Laurène might be able to see her slickness glistening on her inner thigh. The boar grunts, restless, tossing up its head as if it can smell her arousal on the air as she moans into Laurène’s mouth.</p><p>Camille has never been religious, either for the old gods or the new, but still there seems something sacred about this act, and in particular this place. It feels as if her link to the real world might at any moment be severed, leaving her free to slip away with Laurène into this other half-world, as handmaiden, servant, <em>worshipper.</em> Because that is exactly how this feels to her at this moment: an act of worship.</p><p>Dizzy, drunk on fear and arousal, she leans back so that she can gaze on Laurène’s face and meet her eyes. No flicker of recognition there, and even less humanity. No accusation or anger either, but that isn’t much of a consolation.</p><p>Still, Laurène caresses her head with a gentling touch, stroking her fingers through Camille’s hair. Not forgiveness in her eyes, but an invitation, and her legs ease open a fraction. Camille waits a heartbeat, two, before her hands find the crease beneath Laurène’s buttocks.</p><p>Laurène’s legs open wider in acquiescence, her hand resting on the back of Camille’s head, fingers teasing at her scalp with Camille’s hair wrapped around them. Carefully, she puts her hand to Laurène’s cunt. She’s so wet, when Camille slips two fingers inside her, they slide in without resistance. The muscles of Laurène’s sex tighten reflexively, hungrily, around then as she works them against the inner walls. The pad of her thumb finds Laurène’s clit, but it’s not enough, and she crouches lower, so that when she slips her fingers free she can replace them with her mouth. Just her imagination, surely, that the earth beneath her knees seems to shift, dropping her into a position that allows her better access.</p><p>Head bent back, neck aching from the awkwardness of the position, but spurred on by the hand stroking through her hair, one moment gentle, the next pulling at her hair so roughly it hurts, she runs her tongue along the folds of Laurène’s cunt. Hungrily. Eagerly. As though through doing this she can make amends. She’s aching herself, her hips moving involuntarily as Laurène shifts her stance wider and drops her head back, moaning. Her fingers bite into Camille’s scalp as she grinds herself against Camille’s face and tongue. It seems only natural to roll over onto her back, straining upwards with Laurène’s thighs closed in tight either side of her head. As she joins her mouth with her fingers, sliding them back into the slick wet heat, she feels hands against her breasts, the feather-light touch quickly hardening as Laurène cups them, caressing the nipples with lazily slow circles of her thumbs. One moment Laurène barely touches her; the next she pinches her nipples hard enough to flood her with the sweetest kind of pain.</p><p>And then, finally, as a tweak of her nipple acts as a reminder of the task at hand and she brings her attention back to Laurène’s cunt, she feels a cold pressure against the heat between her legs, as if a cool hand of mist has pressed against her. The tips of its fingers dabble inside her, the heel of the hand set hard against her clit, and she bucks at the contact. At her breasts, the hands pinch tight at her nipples, enough to warn, enough to hurt, and above her, Laurène’s hips move in twitching spasms, She’s crying out now, breathless little moans, and the sound of her taking her pleasure is all the more tormenting while the hand set against Camille’s sex remains resolutely still.</p><p>In despair she begins to moves herself, rubbing herself against the contact with breathless urgency, thrusting her hips upwards in search of deeper penetration. And still it’s not enough: she wants more, wants to feel those fingers thrusting inside her, hard and deep and relentless.</p><p>She circles Laurène’s clit with flickering movements of her tongue, dances the tip over and around the sensitive spot, thrusts her fingers, crooked to work at the spot on the front inner wall, inside her. She can tell by the tightening of the muscles in Laurène’s thighs that she’s drawing close, and, judging the moment of Laurène’s peak, she fastens her lips around the clit, sucking on it gently. The reaction is immediate: Laurène shudders above her with a throaty cry that seems to be echoed in Camille’s own chest, the walls of her cunt clenching rhythmically around her fingers in a joyous pulse.</p><p>At that moment, without warning, the fingers of mist that have so far barely penetrated her, unfurl and thrust inside her, up to the knuckle. They feel strange, solid yet insubstantial, as though if she squeezes too hard they might disintegrate and break apart like ice. Laurène still rocks atop her, riding each peaking wave of pleasure, but as Camille falls back, gasping in startled delight, she drops forward and Camille feels the first flittering caress of a hot tongue against her own aching clit.</p><p>The contrasting sensations of hot and cold are almost too much to bear: she comes, arching her back, burying her face in Laurène’s inner thigh, her moans muffled.</p><p>Even in the midst of her orgasm, she can smell the flowers, feel the roots twisting beneath the skin. She cannot remember ever wanted anything more than she wants this. She could steal away, she thinks, or at the very least allow herself to be stolen. Something snakes around her throat, her limbs, through her hair. In the blissful aftermath, with her heart skittering and the pulse of her blood echoed in the muscles of her cunt, she tries to move and finds she can’t: she is pinned to the ground, just as she had been in her dreams of the crow, the talons scratching like thorns at her chest.</p><p>She could fight it, but she’s not at all certain that she wants to, and overhead the crows stain the sky like spilled ink while the trees bear witness.</p><p> </p><p>* * *</p><p> </p><p>She’s dreamed of dying before and it feels just like this: the moment of death in the dream, the gaping chasm of darkness blossoming open to swallow her up, and the instant when she wills herself to move and finds herself frozen, still caught in the dream before she wakes, consumed by relief. This is different: for one thing, she felt more alive in the dream.</p><p><em>Not a dream</em>, she thinks as she tries to sit up, dizzied by the weight of the world pressing in on her, earth, water, trees, sky.</p><p>She’s still in the forest. Dressed, thank god, but barefoot, and the soles of her feet are filthy. The memory of the not-a-dream is too real: she can still feel the lingering touch on her skin and the sweet aftershock of pleasure rippling through her.</p><p>Christ, she’s really losing it.</p><p>She staggers to her feet, swipes the back of her hand across her cheeks, then freezes as a cry rips through the early-morning peace of the forest. It sends a flock of birds bursting from the trees. She looks towards them on instinct, then sees, at the edge of her vision, a figure moving through the trees. A figure, not walking so much as staggering.</p><p>It’s impossible, Laurène’s dead, she has to be dead, and yet here she comes, stumbling through the trees, her face with shock, clinging to the tree trunks as if they’re the only things keeping her on her feet. Impossibly, incredibly alive. Rapid gusts of her breath frost on the air, mingling with the mist as she pauses to gather her strength, then she goes still and lifts her head up as if she’s scented a predator. She turns her head, searching, and her gaze falls on where Camille is standing, holding her breath in shock. They stare at each other.</p><p><em>A gift from the forest,</em> Camille thinks, and doesn’t quite know why. The thought doesn’t quite feel like her own.</p><p>But for every gift the forest gives, it claims a price.</p><p>Then Laurène’s legs crumple beneath her, breaking the stand-off, and Camille is running forwards to catch her and lower her gently to the ground. She pushes Laurène’s hair back, telling her how sorry she is, how she’s going to make things right, no matter what it takes, not knowing if Laurène can hear her, hoping she can.</p><p><em>A life for a life</em>, the forest whispers, and Camille pulls Laurène’s frozen body close, tells her again that she’ll fix everything, while in her mind’s eye she pictures Gérald Steiner flicking the stub of a cigar carelessly into the bushes.</p><p>She can’t fix everything – she’s a liar even now – but she can make a start. No doubt there will be a reckoning to come, but for this, to have Laurène back, she would give anything.</p><p>It is, she thinks, a price worth paying.</p>
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